#Ta Nehisi Coates

[gael-garcia]

"When people start resorting to instruments as blunt and direct as book bans or not allowing discussions— they're threatened. It's a weapon of a weak and a decaying order."

Ta-Nehisi Coates for But We Must Speak: On Palestine & The Mandates of Conscience - watch in full here

[a-bucky-a-day]

| CAPTAIN AMERICA (2018)#5

By Ta Nehisi Coates and Leinil Francis Yu

[natalia-lafourcade]

TONIGHT @ 7PM EST

The Palestinian festival of literature is hosting a panel titled “BUT WE MUST SPEAK ON PALESTINE AND THE MANDATES OF CONSCIOUS” featuring notable guests:

MICHELLE ALEXANDER - Black civil rights lawyer and author of “The New Jim Crow”

TA-NEHISI COATES - Black Award winning writer

NATALIE DIAZ - Award winning Mojave American poet

RASHID KHALIDI - Palestinian- American professor and historian

MOHAMMED EL-KURD - Notable Palestinian journalist, writer and poet.

There will be updates about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, poetry readings, and additional discussions. Please attend!

Palfest will be streaming it live on their YouTube channel, link below:

[cartermagazine]

“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates

CARTER™️ Magazine

[warrioreowynofrohan]

This is the best thing I’ve read yet on the mass bombing of Gaza and on the oppression of the Palestinians. I’ve always had great respect for Ta-Nehisi Coates, and this is just magnificent:

Some excerpts:

And it became very, very clear to me what was going on there. And I have to say it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.

And so, the most shocking thing about my time over there [in the West Bank] was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.

And on Gaza:

…this is like really personal for me, because I came up in a time and in a place where I did not really understand the ethic of nonviolence. And by “ethic,” I mean the notion that violence itself is corrupting, that it corrupts the soul. And I didn’t quite understand that. If I’m truly honest with you, as much as I saw my relationship with the Palestinian people and as much as it was clear what the relationship was, it was at the same time clear that there was some sort of relationship with the Israeli people, too. And it wasn’t one that I particularly enjoyed, because I understood the rage that comes when you have a history of oppression. I understood the anger. I understood the sense of humiliation that comes when people subject you to just manifold oppression, to genocide, and people look away from that. I come from the descendants of 250 years of enslavement. I come from a people who sexual violence and rape is marked in our very bones and in our DNA. And I understand how when you feel that the world has turned its back on you, how you can then turn your back on the ethics of the world. But I also understood how corrupting that can be.

I was listening, actually, to my congressman last night, or I guess it was two nights ago, talk on the news. And a journalist asked him, “How many children, how many people must be killed to justify this operation? Is there an upper limit for the number of people that could be killed, when you would say, 'This is just too much. This just doesn't — this just doesn’t, you know, compute. This does not add up’?” And I will tell you, that congressman couldn’t give a number. And I thought, “That man has been corrupted. That man has lost himself. He’s lost himself in humiliation. He’s lost himself in vengeance. He has lost himself in violence.”

I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again: “the right to self-defense.” What about the right to dignity? What about the right to morality? What about the right to be able to sleep at night? Because what I know is, if I was complicit — and I am complicit — in dropping bombs on children, in dropping bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble sleeping at night. And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can sleep at night.

And on Biden’s response to Gaza:

I mean, I think hearing President Biden himself — and here I will personalize it — downplay the number of Palestinian deaths, to say that he doesn’t believe the Palestinians, I just — when his own State Department was citing those figures only months ago, you know? At some point, you know, there’s that saying: When people show you who they are, you have to believe them. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do the political calculus on this. And I think at a certain point we have to just stop and say, “They believe it.” They believe it. They believe bombs should be dropped on children. They just think it’s OK. They think it’s OK, or at the very least they think it’s the price of doing business.

That’s not an ethic I can align myself from, because, as I’ve said several times in this interview, I come from a history where people wanted to make the exact same calculus about us and took stances that we would now say are immoral. But, see, the test isn’t what you did in the past; the test is what you do in the moment right now. I’m a writer. I would be much more comfortable — I was working on a book about this. I would be much more comfortable sitting at home writing about this, before I’m here talking to you guys right now. It is not my nature to talk about things that I have not written about yet. But one has to balance one’s responsibility against the suffering, against the death, against the body count. And to see what is coming out of this White House right now is just — it’s morally reprehensible. Again, I don’t know how people sleep at night.

[mysharona1987]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/18/south-carolina-teacher-ta-nehisi-coates-racism-lesson/

Teachers afraid that a student might report on them over a book. Totally not a fascist society at all.

[pearwaldorf]

Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to Democracy Now (transcript at link) about his experience in Palestine as a participant in the Palestine Festival of Literature and talked about the similarities in experience between Black people in the US and Palestinians.

The bit that starts at 3:00 is what stands out: the way "complexity" has been used as a silencing tactic to discourage understanding. But on the ground, the experience is familiar and uncomplicated, especially to a Black American.

No doubt you've seen the posts where Palestinians shared tips on how to deal with tear gas during the Ferguson protests in 2014. American police train with the IDF, and those tactics are then used to enact violence upon Black Americans. This is what we mean when we say all struggles are connected: not just on an intellectual or ideological level, but a practical one.

I know it's a long video. But I think you should watch at least the first ten minutes or so (the actual interview starts at the timestamp above).

[latesummerfrost]

Florence Kasumba is an international treasure and I hold onto hope that someday Ayo and Aneka will end up fronting a Midnight Angels/World of Wakanda series. Here's Florence as Ayo with some comics-accurate tattoos in plain pencil. Inks and color maybe to come if I have time. Time to rewatch Falcon and The Winter Soldier to get my fix of this unequivocal woman.

UPDATE : Inks added. Tried my hand at adding Aneka but my proportions are terrible because I'm a bad, bad man who doesn't practice arting like I should.

[protoslacker]

I think some of the frustration that certain, certain people feel about the lack of African American support for this war comes from this notion that we should have people’s back as they drop bombs to try to defend a segregationist apartheid regime. We shouldn’t do that. And we haven’t done that. That’s the history that you allude to, I mean, going back to Angela Davis, to SNCC, to Black Lives Matter. I stand here, or I sit here, very, very humbly as a latecomer to the cause, but someone who has come to the cause nonetheless. We have to stand on principle, Ma’am. We have to stand on principle. And if I’m a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, I’m also a latecomer to the cause of nonviolence, but I’m here now. You know? And knowing what that has meant to our history, you know, to our — there is no way in the world that we can leverage the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, there’s no way in the world we can leverage the weight, the ancestry of our movement, in defense of a war, in defense of indiscriminate bombings on refugee camps. We just — we can’t do that. We can’t do that. We would be a disgrace to our ancestors.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Democracy Now!. Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks Out Against Israel’s “Segregationist Apartheid Regime” After West Bank Visit

[a-bucky-a-day]

| CAPTAIN AMERICA (2018)#1

By Ta Nehisi Coates and Leinil Francis Yu

[readyforevolution]

[agentxthirteen]

Sharon-A-Day, Day 702 (12/3/23)

Captain America V9 12. On sale 7/31/19. "Captain of Nothing: Part VI"

Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Artist: Adam Kubert

Letterer: Joe Caramagna

Colorist: Matt Milla

Editor: Tom Brevoort

Sharon is more of an idealist than she lets on.

[kakashis-kunoichi]

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[keepscrollinghun]

@blackliturgies

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]